The word workstation often refers to a general-purpose computer designed to be used by one person at a time and which offers higher performance than normally found in a personal computer, especially with respect to graphics, processing power and the ability to carry out several tasks at the same time.

Workstations tend to be very expensive, typically several times the cost of a standard PC and sometimes costing as much as a new car.

However, the line between workstation and PC is increasingly becoming blurred as trends toward consolidation and cost-cutting have caused workstation manufacturers to use "off the shelf" PC components and graphics solutions as opposed to proprietary in-house developed technology.

A typical desktop machine might have two of the "low end" Transputers handling I/O tasks on some of their serial lines (hooked up to appropriate hardware) while they talked to one of their larger cousins acting as a CPU on another.

Transputers could be booted over the network links (as opposed to the memory as in most machines) so a single Transputer could start up the entire network.

The Transputer's lack of support for virtual memory inhibited the porting of mainstream variants of the UNIX operating system, though ports of UNIX-like operating systems (such as Minix and Idris from Whitesmiths) were produced.

The original company Atari was a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles, and personal computers, and its dominance in those areas made it THE major force in the computer entertainment industry in the early to mid 1980s.

Although the original Atari ceased to exist in 1996, a large amount of underground development remains for Atari's game systems and computers of the 1970s and 1980s, and much of the Classic Gaming Expo's attention, which has existed since 1997, focuses on Atari.

The Atari 5200 game console, released as a next-generation followup to the 2600, was based on the Atari 800 computer (but was incompatible with Atari 800 game cartridges), and its sales never met the company's expectations.

A computer workstation, often colloquially referred to as workstation, is a high-end general-purpose microcomputer designed to be used by one person at a time and which offers higher performance than normally found in a personal computer, especially with respect to graphics, processing power and the ability to carry out several tasks at the same time.

When comparing with some of the old definitions of computing power, some people may consider a workstation to be the equivalent of a one-person minicomputer.

It is instructive to look at the history of specific technologies which once differentiated workstations from personal computers.

leessummit.us /project/wikipedia/index.php/Workstations (790 words)

AEX - The most comprehensive exploration of Atari online(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)

The Atari ABAQ* as it was originally called, was launched in 1988, and was a project born from what eventually became the UK research office of Atari.

Initial reports mentioned development of an "STTransputer" or add-on board for the the current ST range, but this would be just rumour, the fact was Atari had been developing a very niche product in conjunction with Perihelion, another UK based company.

Atari did use the knowledge of the architecture later on, through the RISC-based design of their gaming system Panther utilising a version of the ATW "Blossom" video system.

www.atari-explorer.com /16bit/transputer.html (375 words)

Atari(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)

The original company Atari was a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles, and personal computers, and its dominance in those areas made it a major force in the computer entertainment industry in the 1980s.

The Atari 5200 game console, released as a next-generation followup to the 2600, was based on the Atari 800 computer (but was compatible with Atari 800 game cartridges), and its sales never met the company's expectations.

The AtariST line proved moderately successful, ultimately selling more than 4 million units, but its closest competitor in the marketplace, the Amiga, outsold it 1.5 to 1.

Atari showed the latest Abaq hardware, which has been renamed the AtariTransputerWorkstation (ATW)--apparently due to complaints from a Belgian company that already owns the name Abaq.

The ATW will sell for a cool t3,000 to t4,000 (approximately $5,250 to $7,000) in the U.K. The ATW's main processor is the Inmos T800-20 transputer (the 68000 is really used only as an I/O device).

The T800 transputer has three significant advantages over processor chips like the 68000 used in an ST. First, since there are fewer fundamental instructions, the chip can operate the refined set much faster.

This is all taken care of at the 68000 end, leaving the Transputer free to handle the heavy stuff." King points to the open guts of an ATW nearby.

Each of these daughter boards has three Transputers on it, and the ATW can hold a total of four boards which means 13 Transputers, all working at once at 10 MIPS [Million Instructions Per Second] and using some 16 megabytes of RAM.

King also notes that while the ATW is currently available in Europe, though in a heavily backordered state, Atari's marketing plans for the ATW in the States are not known at this time.

Although most technologies implemented in workstations are available at a much lower price for the consumer market, finding good components and make sure they work compatibly with each other is a great challenge in workstation building.

Because workstations are designed for high-end tasks (such as weather forecasting, video rendering, game design...), it's taken for granted that these systems must be running under full-load, non-stop for several hours (if not days) without any problem.

For this reason, almost no workstation are built by the customer themselves but rather purchased from a vendor such as HP, IBM, SGI or Dell.

The Atari name was, as it is today, too closely associated to the "game machine" image and thus, gives credibility to the business marketplace being somewhat uneasy as far as investing in the AtariMega ST as a serious business oriented computer.

It is true that Atari has not marketed the ST aggressively in the United States, but Atari has targeted this as the year they return to the American personal computer market and already many print and television ads for the ST are starting to appear on major cable and local metropolitan television networks.

Atari's goal for the end of 1989 is to be selling over 60,000 computers per MONTH in the United States and if sales in the New York Metropolitan region are any indication, Atari is well on the way towards achieving that goal.

The ATW actually consisted two parts, one modified AtariST client and one transputer server part.

the AtariST was used to handle all I/O operations such as keyboard, mouse, SCSI harddrive, printer...

www.codepedia.com /1/AtariATW (203 words)

Articles - Atari(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)

Although the Atari 2600 had garnered the lion's share of the home video game market, it experienced its first stiff competition in 1980 from Mattel's Intellivision, which featured ads touting its superior graphics capabilities relative to the 2600.

The Atari 5200 game console, released as a next-generation follow up to the 2600, was based on the Atari 800 computer (but was incompatible with Atari 800 game cartridges), and its sales never met the company's expectations.

In the meantime, Atari Games was bought out by its employees in [1986], who also founded Tengen to bring their arcade games in to the home.

www.kingj.com /articles/Atari (1842 words)

Atari(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)

The original company Atari was a pioneer in arcade game s, home video game console s, and personal computer s, and its dominance in those areas made it a major force in the computer entertainment industry in the 1980s.

In addition, in December 1982, Atari executives Ray Kassar and Dennis Groth were investigated for insider trading.

Atari eventually released a line of inexpensive IBM PC compatible s as well.

In the late '80s, while I was living in Madrid, I was lent a prototype of the AtariTransputerWorkstation (ATW) (known at the time as the Abaq).

I think I know how to make a link cable to wire it up to the other processors, but I'm not sure that all of the wiring from the backplane inside the x'plorer to the outside of the case is all correct.

Therefore some information may not apply or may simply be incorrect for Issue 4 and ATW machines (for example, the video chip described here is known as "Charity", rather than "Charity II" or "Blossom" as it was in the ATW).

The Atari ATW800 Transputerworkstation was a high end, high powered system which combined the power of the ABAQ Transputer system with the front end power of the AtariMega ST. Used together, they formed an amazingly powerful and versital computer.

These power-house workstations could then be linked to one another to form parallel processing networks where each workstation then formed a piece of the whole and the entire network could then work together.

The ATWI/O Subsystem consisted of an AtariMega ST in a compact form with

www.atarimuseum.com /computers/16bits/transputer.html (266 words)

Alive 7 - transput(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)

This subsystem is based upon the AtariMega ST specification and is able to function independent of the host T800 main system.

Helios is responsible for distributing program components to the appropriate processor in the transputer network.

About two hundred and fifty of these workstations were made, most of them ending up doing photo-processing work for Kodak.

alive.atari.org /alive7/transput.html (816 words)

Atari ATW800 hardware(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)

If you are missing the harddisk or it is broken, you can use the 40 MB disk found in the Atari TT, likewise for the floppy drive.

A transputer link connects J1 on the farm card to Link 1, connector T8 on the T800 board.

The farm card documentation has a list of which connectors are which transputer links.

Perihelion Software was a UK company founded in 1986 by Dr Tim King along with a number of colleagues who had all worked together at MetaComCo on AmigaOS and written compilers for both the Amiga and the AtariST.

This was a system that looked like Unix but which could pass messages to processes running on either the same processor or another one.

This was used in the AtariTransputerWorkstation among other places.

www.worldhistory.com /wiki/P/Perihelion-Software.htm (175 words)

Atari ATW800 hacking(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)

The farm card uses 1 MB of RAM per transputer.

The ATW brochure says the RAM chips can be replaced to upgrade to 4 MB per transputer.

One who would be willing to risk his or her ATW could do some soldering and put in a 16 Mhz 68000, 4 MB RAM, TOS 2.06 etc. I'm not sure I will ever try.

I have an Atari ATW800 TransputerWorkstation without some chip of the IO system board.

I have three Atari systems I have a XE and a STE also the elderly 2600.

It would be a pity to discard those games, or indeed miss out on the many new games being developed today, some modern classics are available at AtariAge, http://www.atariage.com - you may even be surprised at the current level of activity on this cult machine.

www.myatari.net /issues/dec2004/mailbox.htm (355 words)

Atari ATW800 information(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)

I set up this page after I managed to restore my ATW to working order.

It took me quite a while to find all this info so I figured I'd publish it, on the off-chance that someone may need it someday.

It does not contain information specific to the ATW, but it is a very good resource for Helios system administration and programming.